Gerard 't Hooft is a physicist with a deep interest in fundamental questions - and one of the founders of the Standard Model of Physics that describes all particles and their behavior. For his fundamental work, he now (2025) received the famous "Oscar of the Sciences"- the Breaktrough Prize.

But 't Hooft is by no coincidence member of our consortium! Black holes fascinate him just as much as particle physics, if not more... He was one of the founders of the Holographic Model of black holes (read more here) and vividly debates about how to combine general relativity and quantummechanics at the edge of the black hole's event horizon. 

Breaktrough Prize

“Gerard 't Hooft is one of the world’s most pre-eminent theoretical physicists”, says the press release issued by the organisation behind the awards. “In the early 1970s he made crucial contributions to the foundations of what would later become known as the Standard Model of the subatomic particles.”

Among many other achievements, 't Hooft proved that Yang-Mills theories, the concept underlying theories of weak and strong nuclear forces, make sense when treated quantum mechanically. Also, he made several crucial contributions to understanding the theory of the strong force. This force binds protons and neutrons together, as well as keeping quarks together. He developed new mathematical tools for studying quarks that strongly interact, and he introduced the fruitful approach of studying the strong force by imagining it is mediated by many more varieties of quarks and gluons than it actually is.

The prize comes with 3 Million euro to spend freely. But knowing Gerard this will defenitely support science even more...!

Gerard 't Hooft and black hole research

At the edge of a black hole, something strange happens in the vacuum: virtual particle pairs briefly pop into existence out of "nothing," thanks to the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Normally, these virtual particles annihilate each other almost instantly. But near a black hole’s immense gravitational field, one particle of the pair can fall into the event horizon while the other escapes — becoming real. This escaping radiation is known as Hawking radiation, named after Stephen Hawking, who first proposed the mechanism.

But this picture leads to a profound puzzle that has occupied physicists worldwide: in physics, energy must be conserved. If energy escapes from the black hole in the form of radiation, then something must be lost from the black hole itself — implying that it slowly evaporates over time.

From a classical point of view, the black hole is simply radiating away mass and energy. But quantum theory tells us that information cannot be destroyed. Hawking radiation, in its original formulation, appears completely random — it carries no trace of what fell into the black hole. This leads to the famous black hole information paradox:

If a black hole evaporates and disappears, and the radiation contains no information, then information is lost — violating the rules of quantum mechanics.

Physicists — including members of our own Dutch Black Hole Consortium — are still working to resolve this paradox. New ideas suggest that information might be subtly encoded in the Hawking radiation after all, perhaps through quantum correlations, or deeper mechanisms involving quantum gravity, holography, wormholes, firewalls, or the recently proposed entanglement islands.

One of the deepest thinkers on this subject is Gerard ’t Hooft, who has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of black hole quantum structure. Below is one of his key articles:

"On the Quantum Structure of a Black Hole"

 Abstract:"The assumption is made that black holes should be subject to the same rules of quantum mechanics as ordinary elementary particles or composite systems. Although a complete theory for reconciling this requirement with that of general coordinate transformation invariance is not yet in sight, a number of observations can be made and a general framework is suggested." - Gerard 't Hooft

Full article can be found here

Also, a great detailed series of articles about this topic (in Dutch) can be found at QuantumUniverse, see here. 

Our DBHC consortium continues to explore these fundamental riddles of black hole physics — through new theories, simulations, and experiments.

We warmly congratulate Gerard ’t Hooft on receiving the Breakthrough Prize, and we hope he continues to inspire and contribute to black hole research for many years to come!